Describing his trip with Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) onboard Admiral Tobakoff, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions a straw of Procrustean procrastination:
He clutched at a red rope and they entered the lounge.
‘Whom did she look like?’ asked Lucette. ‘En laid et en lard?’
‘I don’t know,’ he lied. ‘Whom?’
‘Skip it,’ she said. ‘You’re mine tonight. Mine, mine, mine!’
She was quoting Kipling — the same phrase that Ada used to address to Dack. He cast around for a straw of Procrustean procrastination.
‘Please,’ said Lucette, ‘I’m tired of walking around, I’m frail, I’m feverish, I hate storms, let’s all go to bed!’
‘Hey, look!’ he cried, pointing to a poster. ‘They’re showing something called Don Juan’s Last Fling. It’s prerelease and for adults only. Topical Tobakoff!’
‘It’s going to be an unmethylated bore,’ said Lucy (Houssaie School, 1890) but he had already pushed aside the entrance drapery. (3.5)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): en laid et en lard: in an ugly and fleshy version.
After the movie Lucette commits suicide by jumping from Admiral Tobakoff into the Atlantic Ocean. In his Avtobiograficheskie zametki (Autobiographical Notes) written in the early 1950s Ivan Bunin (1870-1953) describes his conversation with Chekhov, compares himself to a drowning man who catches at a straw and quotes Chekhov's words about the Decadents (whom Bunin praised as a new movement in literature):
Как утопающий за соломинку, я ухватился за «декадентов», которых считал новым течением в литературе.
- Никаких декадентов нет и не было, - безжалостно доконал меня Чехов. - Откуда вы их взяли? Жулики они, а не декаденты. Вы им не верьте. И ноги у них вовсе не «бледные», а такие же как у всех - волосатые...
...Мне Чехов говорил о декадентах несколько иначе, чем Тихонову, - не только как о жуликах:
- Какие они декаденты! - говорил он, - они здоровеннейшие мужики, их бы в арестантские роты отдать...
According to Chekhov, there are not and have never been any Decadents. They are not Decadents, but cheats and robust muzhiks whose place is in the penal battalions. Blednye nogi (pale legs) mentioned by Chekhov hint at the famous monostich by Bryusov: O zakroy svoi blednye nogi! ("O cover your pale legs!") A Symbolist poet of whom Bunin makes fun in his Autobiographical Notes, Valeriy Bryusov is the author of Condor (1921). It is Miss Condor (as Lucette calls a Tobakoff passanger) who looks like Ada en laid et en lard.
In a letter to Van written after Lucette's death Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) mentions the Decadent School of writing to which his son belongs, in company of naughty old Leo [Tolstoy] and consumptive Anton [Chekhov]:
Son:
I have followed your instructions, anent that letter, to the letter. Your epistolary style is so involute that I should suspect the presence of a code, had I not known you belonged to the Decadent School of writing, in company of naughty old Leo and consumptive Anton. I do not give a damn whether you slept or not with Lucette; but I know from Dorothy Vinelander that the child had been in love with you. The film you saw was, no doubt, Don Juan’s Last Fling in which Ada, indeed, impersonates (very beautifully) a Spanish girl. A jinx has been cast on our poor girl’s career. Howard Hool argued after the release that he had been made to play an impossible cross between two Dons; that initially Yuzlik (the director) had meant to base his ‘fantasy’ on Cervantes’s crude romance; that some scraps of the basic script stuck like dirty wool to the final theme; and that if you followed closely the sound track you could hear a fellow reveler in the tavern scene address Hool twice as ‘Quicks.’ Hool managed to buy up and destroy a number of copies while others have been locked up by the lawyer of the writer Osberg, who claims the gitanilla sequence was stolen from one of his own concoctions. In result it is impossible to purchase a reel of the picture which will vanish like the proverbial smoke once it has fizzled out on provincial screens. Come and have dinner with me on July 10. Evening dress. (3.6)
In his Introduction to W. von Polenz's "Der Büttnerbauer" (1902) Leo Tolstoy mentions the so-called Decadent works that look like bred bezumnogo (a madman's delirium) and that should be solved like rebus puzzles:
В прошлом году мой знакомый, вкусу которого я доверяю, дал мне прочесть немецкий роман «Бютнербауэр» фон Поленца. Я прочел и был удивлен тому, что такое произведение, появившееся года два тому назад, никому почти не известно.
Роман этот не есть одна из тех подделок под художественные произведения, которые в таком огромном количестве производятся в наше время, а настоящее художественное произведение. Роман этот не принадлежит ни к тем, не представляющим никакого интереса описаниям событий и лиц, искусственно соединенных между собою только потому, что автор, выучившись владеть техникой художественных описаний, желает написать новый роман; ни к тем, облеченным в форму драмы или романа, диссертациям на заданную тему, которые также в наше время сходят в публике за художественные произведения; не принадлежит в к произведениям, называемым декадентскими, особенно нравящимся современной публике именно тем, что, будучи похожими на бред безумного, они представляют из себя нечто вроде ребусов, отгадывание которых составляет приятное занятие и вместе с тем считается признаком утонченности.
In his Introduction Tolstoy mentions the literary Germans who have heard Polenz's name but who did not read his novel, although all of them have read the latest novels of Zola, and the stories of Kipling (whom, according to Van, Lucette is quoting) and the dramas of Ibsen, and d'Annunzio, and even Maeterlinck:
Роман этот, несомненно, прекрасное произведение искусства, с чем согласится всякий, кто прочтет его. А между тем роман этот появился три года тому назад, и хотя он и был у нас переведен в «Вестнике Европы», он прошел совершенно незамеченным и в России и в Германии. Я спрашивал нескольких, встреченных за последнее время, литературных немцев про этот роман,— они слышали имя Поленца, но не читали его романа, хотя все читали последние романы Золя, и рассказы Киплинга, и драмы Ибсена, и д’Анунцио, и даже Метерлинка.
Describing his childhood travels, Van mentions Goethe's and d'Annunzio's marble footprints reverently pointed out to him by AAA (Andrey Andreevich Aksakov, Van’s Russian tutor):
After that, they tried to settle whether their ways had merged somewhere or run closely parallel for a bit that year in Europe. In the spring of 1881, Van, aged eleven, spent a few months with his Russian tutor and English valet at his grandmother’s villa near Nice, while Demon was having a much better time in Cuba than Dan was at Mocuba. In June, Van was taken to Florence, and Rome, and Capri, where his father turned up for a brief spell. They parted again, Demon sailing back to America, and Van with his tutor going first to Gardone on Lake Garda, where Aksakov reverently pointed out Goethe’s and d’Annunzio’s marble footprints, and then staying for a while in autumn at a hotel on a mountain slope above Leman Lake (where Karamzin and Count Tolstoy had roamed). Did Marina suspect that Van was somewhere in the same general area as she throughout 1881? Probably no. Both girls had scarlet fever in Cannes, while Marina was in Spain with her Grandee. After carefully matching memories, Van and Ada concluded that it was not impossible that somewhere along a winding Riviera road they passed each other in rented victorias that both remembered were green, with green-harnessed horses, or perhaps in two different trains, going perhaps the same way, the little girl at the window of one sleeping car looking at the brown sleeper of a parallel train which gradually diverged toward sparkling stretches of sea that the little boy could see on the other side of the tracks. The contingency was too mild to be romantic, nor did the possibility of their having walked or run past each other on the quay of a Swiss town afford any concrete thrill. But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years — problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space — and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die. (1.24)
Ten-year-old Van struggles to keep back his tears and AAA blows his fat red nose, when shown the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah:
The year 1880 (Aqua was still alive — somehow, somewhere!) was to prove to be the most retentive and talented one in his long, too long, never too long life. He was ten. His father had lingered in the West where the many-colored mountains acted upon Van as they had on all young Russians of genius. He could solve an Euler-type problem or learn by heart Pushkin’s ‘Headless Horseman’ poem in less than twenty minutes. With white-bloused, enthusiastically sweating Andrey Andreevich, he lolled for hours in the violet shade of pink cliffs, studying major and minor Russian writers — and puzzling out the exaggerated but, on the whole, complimentary allusions to his father’s volitations and loves in another life in Lermontov’s diamond-faceted tetrameters. He struggled to keep back his tears, while AAA blew his fat red nose, when shown the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah where he had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general’s bastard, shot by Cora Day in his swimming pool. What a soprano Cora had been! Demon took Van to the world-famous Opera House in Telluride in West Colorado and there he enjoyed (and sometimes detested) the greatest international shows — English blank-verse plays, French tragedies in rhymed couplets, thunderous German musical dramas with giants and magicians and a defecating white horse. He passed through various little passions — parlor magic, chess, fluff-weight boxing matches at fairs, stunt-riding — and of course those unforgettable, much too early initiations when his lovely young English governess expertly petted him between milkshake and bed, she, petticoated, petititted, half-dressed for some party with her sister and Demon and Demon’s casino-touring companion, bodyguard and guardian angel, monitor and adviser, Mr Plunkett, a reformed card-sharper. (1.28)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): The Headless Horseman: Mayn Reid’s title is ascribed here to Pushkin, author of The Bronze Horseman.
Lermontov: author of The Demon.
Tolstoy etc.: Tolstoy’s hero, Haji Murad (a Caucasian chieftain), is blended here with General Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, and with the French revolutionary leader Marat assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday.
In Tolstoy's story Otets Sergiy ("Father Sergius," 1911) the hero chops off his finger in order to resist lust. Describing the night of Lucette's suicide, Van mentions Count Tolstoy's famous anecdote:
In a series of sixty-year-old actions which now I can grind into extinction only by working on a succession of words until the rhythm is right, I, Van, retired to my bathroom, shut the door (it swung open at once, but then closed of its own accord) and using a temporary expedient less far-fetched than that hit upon by Father Sergius (who chops off the wrong member in Count Tolstoy’s famous anecdote), vigorously got rid of the prurient pressure as he had done the last time seventeen years ago. And how sad, how significant that the picture projected upon the screen of his paroxysm, while the unlockable door swung open again with the movement of a deaf man cupping his ear, was not the recent and pertinent image of Lucette, but the indelible vision of a bent bare neck and a divided flow of black hair and a purple-tipped paint brush.
Then, for the sake of safety, he repeated the disgusting but necessary act.
He saw the situation dispassionately now and felt he was doing right by going to bed and switching off the ‘ectric’ light (a surrogate creeping back into international use). The blue ghost of the room gradually established itself as his eyes got used to the darkness. He prided himself on his willpower. He welcomed the dull pain in his drained root. He welcomed the thought which suddenly seemed so absolutely true, and new, and as lividly real as the slowly widening gap of the sitting room’s doorway, namely, that on the morrow (which was at least, and at best, seventy years away) he would explain to Lucette, as a philosopher and another girl’s brother, that he knew how agonizing and how absurd it was to put all one’s spiritual fortune on one physical fancy and that his plight closely resembled hers, but that he managed, after all, to live, to work, and not pine away because he refused to wreck her life with a brief affair and because Ada was still a child. At that point the surface of logic began to be affected by a ripple of sleep, but he sprang back into full consciousness at the sound of the telephone. The thing seemed to squat for each renewed burst of ringing and at first he decided to let it ring itself out. Then his nerves surrendered to the insisting signal, and he snatched up the receiver.
No doubt he was morally right in using the first pretext at hand to keep her away from his bed; but he also knew, as a gentleman and an artist, that the lump of words he brought up was trite and cruel, and it was only because she could not accept him as being either, that she believed him:
‘Mozhno pridti teper’ (can I come now)?’ asked Lucette.
‘Ya ne odin (I’m not alone),’ answered Van.
A small pause followed; then she hung up. (3.5)
Lucette thinks that Van is with Miss Condor. In his book Dobro v uchenii grafa Tolstogo i Nitsshe ("The Good in the Teaching of Count Tolstoy and F. Nietzsche," 1900) Lev Shestov mentions prokrustovo lozhe (the Procrustean bed) of Tolstoy's own needs:
Гр. Толстой теперь говорит, что "добро - есть Бог!" Его прошлая жизнь, его личный опыт были таковы, что проверить возвещаемый принцип он не мог. Хотя он и искал добра всю свою жизнь, но, как помнит читатель, он всегда умел укладывать это добро на прокрустово ложе собственных нужд.
Tolstoy now tells us that "the good is God." But his past life, his personal experiences, were such that he had no possibility of testing the principle proclaimed by him. He had, it is true, sought the good all his life, but he always had the ability to stretch the good on the Procrustean bed of his own needs. (chapter 12)
In his Introduction to W. von Polenz's "Der Büttnerbauer" Tolstoy says that, in our time, the immoral, coarse, pompous, incoherent babblings of Nietzsche are acknowledged as the last word of philosophy:
В наше время невежество образованной толпы дошло уже до того, что все настоящие великие мыслители, поэты, прозаики, как древности, так и XIX века, считаются отсталыми, не удовлетворяющими уже высоким и утонченным требованиям новых людей. На все это смотрят или с презрением, или с снисходительной улыбкой. Последним словом философии в наше время признается безнравственная, грубая, напыщенная, бессвязная болтовня Ницше; бессмысленный, искусственный набор слов, соединенных размером и рифмой, разных декадентских стихотворений считается поэзией высшего разбора; на всех театрах даются пьесы, смысл которых никому, не исключая и автора, неизвестен, и в миллионах экземпляров печатаются и распространяются, под видом художественных произведений, романы, не имеющие в себе ни содержания, ни художественности.
Like Polenz and Nietzsche, Dack (the dackel at Ardis) is German:
A remote cousin, no longer René’s sister, not even his half-sister (so lyrically anathematized by Monparnasse), she stepped over him as over a log and returned the embarrassed dog to Marina. The actor, who quite likely would run into some body’s fist in a forthcoming scene, made a filthy remark in broken French.
'Du sollst nicht zuhören,’ murmured Ada to German Dack before putting him back in Marina’s lap under the ‘accursed children.’ ‘On ne parle pas comme ça devant un chien,’ added Ada, not deigning to glance at Pedro, who nevertheless got up, reconstructed his crotch, and beat her to the pool with a Nurjinski leap. (1.32)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): du sollst etc.: Germ., you must not listen.
an ne parle pas etc.: one does not speak like that in front of a dog.
In his autobiography Speak, Memory (1951) VN says that the grandparents of the Nabokovs' dachshund Box II, a dog that followed its masters into exile, were Dr Anton Chekhov's Quina and Brom. Describing Lucette's death, Van mentions a dackel in a half-torn wreath:
The sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head, and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness, in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes — telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression — that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude.
She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an unanalyzable brook; but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. She saw a pair of new vair-furred bedroom slippers, which Brigitte had forgotten to pack; she saw Van wiping his mouth before answering, and then, still withholding the answer, throwing his napkin on the table as they both got up; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-torn wreath.
A brilliantly illumined motorboat was launched from the — not-too-distant ship with Van and the swimming coach and the oilskin-hooded Toby among the would-be saviors; but by that time a lot of sea had rolled by and Lucette was too tired to wait. Then the night was filled with the rattle of an old but still strong helicopter. Its diligent beam could spot only the dark head of Van, who, having been propelled out of the boat when it shied from its own sudden shadow, kept bobbing and bawling the drowned girl’s name in the black, foam-veined, complicated waters. (3.5)